Troubleshooting

Last Updated on Thursday, 19 January 2012 02:35Written by admin

My NeTV stucks at firmware < 20 and doesn't auto-update

Bad news is firmware before 23 or so is looking for chumby.com.sg server, which has gone down permanently.
Good news is you can force it update to later firmware (31 or later) and bring back auto-update mechanism.

You’ll need Internet access on NeTV for this update, so first, please configure WiFi with the IR remote control or Android app.
Then follow the following steps:

Enable SSH under Settings menu (still using IR remote control)

Go into your NeTV with a SSH client (Windows users can use PuTTY, Mac/Linux users can use ssh from a terminal window)ssh 192.168.1.123 #substitue with your NeTV's IP address

The UI

Last Updated on Thursday, 12 January 2012 05:49Written by admin

NeTV local UI is entirely rendered by Webkit browser, running in a chromeless/fullscreen fashion.
The UI is written in JavaScript & HTML.
Hardware integration is supported by submitting POST/GET request to http://localhost/bridge. (See HTTP API)

AMI Instance

Last Updated on Monday, 16 January 2012 01:22Written by admin

Introduction

What is AMI Instance?

The Amazon AMI is a preconfigured machine image that can be used for developing on the chumby NeTV board. It comes with a copy of the chumby build system and source code, as well as a precompiled image suitable for burning directly onto an SD card.

Quickstart OE

Last Updated on Monday, 16 January 2012 01:20Written by admin

Background

Amazon offers pay-as-you-use cloud servers. You can attach disks to virtual machines just like you would a physical machine. Disk images can be shared between users, and they are identified by a code known as an “AMI” (Amazon Machine Image).

Chumby has pre-built an OE image, so that all of the packages are resident and built, thus allowing you to get started on developing your application right away, without having to spend hours configuring and downloading the source code for the entire universe. You can use these AMIs as a starting point for development; and if you mess up, you can always restart the instance from a fresh image again (but back up your changes before you do that!).

Amazon offers several tiers of machines, with varying prices (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/). We recommend using a “medium high-CPU” or “small” instance type, which cost $0.17 and $0.085 per hour, respectively (pricing as of April 2011). Building is a very CPU and memory-intensive task, and on a “medium high-CPU” instance, a full build from clean takes 6 hours to complete.

Amazon also offers a free “micro” tier, but there are a number of restrictions on it, including a very tight 600 MB RAM limit, and a 10 GB EBS disk limit. Open embedded barely fits in a 10GB EBS volume, and in fact will not build from clean in 600 MB of RAM. However, we offer the pre-built image for micro tiers for users who just want to evaluate the solution to see if this is something they want to pay for. On a micro tier you can build a couple small packages and re-create images, sufficient for a quick hack or evaluation, but we do not recommend doing serious development on a micro instance.

”’Note”’: “free” micro images have limits on the amount of disk operations and bandwidth you can use before you are automatically charged, and there is no warning for when billing starts. On the other hand, most charges are on the order of pennies per quanta, so you are unlikely to run up a big bill during evaluation.

If you want to build your own OE image entirely from scratch, please see Building OpenEmbedded for instructions on how to do that.

”Warning”: something that is not obvious is that if you use an “instance” store (/mnt by default), all data on that disk is lost when you reboot the instance. Instance stores are fast and free for access, but ephemeral and unreliable. EBS, which is the mechanism we use to distribute the OE image (mounted on “/” in our instance), is a reliable, permanent medium that is slower, archiveable and costs money to access, but at least you don’t lose the data when you reboot.